I started 2019 in Calgary, having just landed the day before. I woke up in a rented apartment with fairy lights and an almost impossible quiet. I had told myself for so much of my adult life that my super-power was that I would always be okay… and then something happened near the end of 2018 and for a good long while, I wasn’t okay. And I needed to run away. I had to figure out where to go from there.

January 1st 2019 was the first day of ten calendar months that I would be away from home. Last year was a year with more alone-time than maybe any other in my life — a quietude which I tried to fill and inflate with endless podcasts and music and books and time spent on facebook. From day one of the adventure, I knew I would have plenty of time to indulge my inner introvert, but having all that time made me… afraid. Afraid of collapsing into that not-being-okay. Afraid of the lonely dark. So I gave myself a goal, a resolution for 2019.

I taped up an affirmational poster in my room: 2019 was the year I told myself, ‘I am an Avatar of Excitement!’. A year to be a force in the world for unexpected tinglings and happy nerves. A year that was more than just running away. That was my new year’s resolution. I feel I accomplished a fair amount of that. I tried.

Thank you to everyone who made my year feel worthwhile. Thank you to Evan and Kendra and Sydney and Cameron and Matthew and Mandie and Ashton and Kristin and Becca and Toby and Helen and Jamie and Shannon and Carly and Bea and Jacqui and Ian and Gareth and Josh and Charlene and Olivia and Ken and Kelly and Rachel and Miranda and Danny and Abigail and Nyala and Kieran and Katelyn and Alina and everyone else.

I don’t know what my goal for 2020 will be, if I choose to have one. Still sussing that out. But I’m happy to have had my year of adventure.

I recently read Bryan Cranston’s ‘A Life in Parts’. The dude knows his stuff (obviously). Go read the book!

Here are a few of the great pieces of advice for actors that I pulled out for future pondering:

When you first start out in the business, you have to expend a lot of energy. Hustling isn’t complicated. How much energy you put out dictates how much heat you generate.

You can teach someone how to drive a car or throw a fastball, but it’s hard to teach someone to let go.

The best teacher is experience.

Finding love is about being open, letting someone see you as you really are – not some fascimile of what you think someone wants.

He cries, he laughs, he kills, he hits all the emotional notes. If he didn’t hit his mark, it was worthless. He wasn’t lit properly. Or he was out of focus.

It was important for the actor to speak loudly enough so the sound could pick up what he was saying but softly enough to maintain intimacy if intimacy was required… private but detectable.

On camera, when you walk into a room in your own home, you must know where the light switch is. You can’t need to look. Or else it’s a lie, which is like giving the audience a pinch of poison… if your character has a longtime girlfriend and you’re tentative or formal with her, touching her as if she’s someone you just met Another pinch.

Wallace Stevens wrote, “The imperfect is our paradise.”

This whole business is a confidence game. If you believe it, they’ll believe it. If you don’t believe it, neither will they… I don’t feel entirely comfortable hiring someone who doesn’t emit confidence… Confidence is king… actors need to have an arrogance about them. Not in public or in their private lives, but when they work. Actors have to have that drive, that instinct that says: this role is mine.

When I started getting a lot of guest-star roles, I’d make postcards and send them to casting directors to alert them. Watch Bryan Cranston in Matlock this week! Don’t miss Bryan Cranston’s guest turn as Tom Logan in Baywatch! Tune in to Amazon Women on the Moon for a special treat: Bryan Cranston stars as Paramedic #3. I knew 99 percent wouldn’t watch, but they would see my name. They would see my face. And they would get the message, even if only on a subliminal level. This guy works a lot.

You’re acting. You have to have some boundaries. You have to look out for your fellow actors. When someone gets hurt on the set, it spoils everything. The fun you’re having, creating – if someone gets hurt, it all goes away.

Jerry (Seinfeld) had a rule about jokes: If you’re in the group, you can make the joke. If you’re not in the group, steer clear.

It’s more important to have a dream than to achieve a dream.

If you want to be a successful actor, mental toughness is essential. Lay your whole self-worth on getting the role, on the illusion of validaton, before long you’re left angry, resentful, and jealous. You’re doomed.

I focus on process rather than outcome. I wasn’t going to the audition to get anything: a job or money or validation. I wasn’t going to compete with the other guys. I was going to give something. I wasn’t there to get a job. I was there to do a job. Simple as that… my job was to focus on character. My job was to be interesting. My job was to be compelling. Take some chances. Serve the text. Enjoy the process.

And this wasn’t some semantic sleight of hand, it wasn’t some subtle form of barter or gamesmanship. There was to be no predicting or manipulating, no thinking of the outcome. Outcome was irrelevant. I couldn’t afford any longer to approach my work as a means to an end.

Once I made the switch, I was no longer a supplicant. I had power in any room I walked into. Which meant I could relax. I was free.

I learned to take control of the room. If I felt the scene called for the two characters to be standing, I might ask the casting director to please get up.

I’d learned that if a character wasn’t in the script, I had to infer it or imagine it. I had to take it on myself to build it.

An actor needs a core quality or essence for a character. Everything rises from there.

Character is both formed and revealed when we are tested, when we are forced to make decisions under pressure. That test can either make us stronger or it can highlight our weaknesses and crack us into pieces.

Difficult (actors) and creatively engaged (actors) are not the same. Having an engaged, invested cast and crew comes through on a molecular level.

As an actor, you have to be able to endure repetition without losing emotion or energy. You’re hysterical? Do it again. You’re experiencing the most piercing loss? Do it again. And again. How to be honest and true and feel all of those feelings on command? Then repeat? You just do. To get through, to communicate, to move your audience regardless of the problems, that’s the job.

How he decides on a role (weighted in this order): Story first, then Text, then Role, then Director, then Cast/Misc, then Time.Of course, every now and then, an offer comes up that’s too good to refuse.

It’s okay to be afraid. Being afraid can actually be a sign you’re doing something worthwhile. If I’m considering a role and it makes me nervous, but I can’t stop thinking about it – that’s often a good indication I’m onto something important.

I think you run a tremendous risk of getting complacent if you don’t keep looking for changes. You should never be too at ease on stage. Get too rehearsed, too relaxed, you lose focus and slip into autopilot, and then you’re not listening… some actors panic; some assimilate mistakes and correct course. If you’re paying attention, if you’re present, more often than not you can rise to the occasion… you have to be open and present and willing to adapt. If you tell me a play is locked at opening night and there’s no room for exploration or change, I’d say I’m probably not the best actor for your play… every performance needs to have its intimacy, its difference.

I’m Andrew Wade, and I’m here to talk to you about life with dayjobs as a theatre artist. This isn’t advice persay, because goodness knows I don’t have a perfectly arranged life, but I thought I’d share a few ways I’ve seen people somehow both manage paying their rent and working in theatre, and what I’ve found works for me.

First, if you’re a Vancouver artist who makes their whole living doing what you love… bravo! You have my respect. Whether you’re someone who managed to slowly increase the percentage of your income earned by theatre work, piece by piece, until it made up the whole of your income, or one of those brave souls who quit everything and leapt face first into the profession to great success… I’m impressed.

I know of one fringe artist who works his butt off all summer long. He travels from fringe festival to fringe festival, using those May to September months to earn his income for the entire year. It seems like half of the time, he didn’t even win the draw to be in the particular fringe festival, but he hounds the organizers for open spots, and when some company drops out at the last minute, as often happens, he seizes the opportunity, flyers like a madman, and draws crowds. Now, this is Fringe Festival money, not investment banker money, so to survive off his earnings he then lives the rest of his year in somewhere with cheap living expenses, like an island in the pacific ocean. Earn quick, live cheap.

That’s a sort of balance. But for most of us, we need day jobs. Personally, I’ve always been enamoured by the idea of working like someone out in the oil fields, going hard for four months of the year, and then having enough money to take the rest of the year off to make art, act in shows, write. But then I’d have to work in the oil fields, and with these delicate hands? Pass. But if you can find high paying seasonal work, amazing.

There are also plenty of people in our community who choose to work the full time joe job that lets them act in one solid production a year, and if that’s your life, all the more power to you!

But for those of you like myself who want to hustle all year ‘round, going to auditions and seeking out roles, maybe booking the odd stage management or directing gig, you’re going to want to look at finding flexible work where you get to opt in to all of your working hours rather than constantly needing to get shifts covered. Many theatre artists do the 9am-5pm, full time job, and then straight to rehearsals and performances every evening, but in my view, those fifteen hour days just aren’t sustainable.

When looking for a flexible day job that will let you take time off to work that theatre contract, there are a couple of categories. First, there’s the job that you can do ANYWHERE, AT ANY TIME. My own part-time role as Executive Director for the Richmond Arts Coalition is like that. 98% of the job is spent online, updating websites and databases, sending off emails and scouring the web for arts events to compile into even more emails… all stuff I can do at 2am or whenever it’ll fit into my schedule. Other theatre artists I know do transcription work – writing up the words spoken in videos for a fee. These are jobs that are guaranteed not to be double-booked with the moment you’re about to go on as Lady Macbeth.

Second, there are the day jobs with opt-in scheduling. These are jobs that send out or post a schedule each month and say ‘what days can you work?’ and then they fill their shifts accordingly. The key to these jobs is to be valuable but expendable. You want them to want you to work as much as possible, but to not NEED you to be there. For me, I have wonderful employers at SFU Woodwards and Gateway Theatre who work this way for my Front of House Manager jobs, and my event shifts at Science World and for a company unfortunately acronymed as BBW work similarly. They’re delighted to have me, but the roof won’t fall in if I’m not there, because I’m one of a fleet of workers they have to fill those shifts. The shift opportunities themselves are quite irregular and they couldn’t have full time workers if they wanted to as the shifts only happen when there is a show or an event!, so they can’t expect their workers not to have other things going on in their life.

I’m told that serving jobs often pretend to be like this, but are often a trap, leading to angry employers demanding their employees be there for the busy Saturday when they’re supposed to be at rehearsal. I’ve steered clear of those jobs.

The downside to this kind of work is that it tends not to pay a whole lot, admittedly. That’s a sacrifice I make for knowing I can build a survivable, steady income whenever I don’t have a theatre gig to take up my time.

You may have noticed that most of my own day jobs are arts related. That is no coincidence! I’ve surrounded my work life with bosses who love the arts and want me to succeed as an artist, and that support is invaluable. There have been a lot of company rules bent in my direction to help me along my path because my bosses believe in the arts, and they believe in me.

To emphasize that point, I just came off of a dinner theatre contract that kept me in Alberta for five months, and might have gone as long as eight months. I was real nervous about it – I accepted the gig in late November and left December 31st. Not a whole lot of notice. I was sure I was going to lose some of my Vancouver safety net, but you know what? To a person, my bosses were all delighted for me. They told me not to worry about it, and that they’d look forward to offering me shifts when I got back into town. And now I’ve accepted a second dinner theatre contract that’ll take me back to the prairies from mid July until either January or April, and they’re still happy for me.

So that’s my advice – if you want to be theatre-flexible all year round, find jobs with bosses who love the theatre where you can be valuable but expendable, so that you can disappear for that two month contract when you book it. My own financial anxiety finds the idea of dropping all day jobs to pursue my art full time to be far too intimidating (and frankly, I’m not sure I’ve got the talent to achieve a lofty goal like that in Vancouver), so I keep dayjobs like these, with my schedule flexible but my rent payments steady.

I broke her heart as a dandelion.She saw me as a flowerwhen I wondered if I were a weed.We grew stubborn rootsthat kept us together through two breakups.Though my petals leaned away,something deeper kept its grip,brought me back to the soil of us,to the school field and the ocean air,

And then it didn’t.

I was a dandelion,and I could feel the change in the seasons,my petals turning to seeds,with the lightness and lift that comes from them,and I couldn’t remain a bright flower for her;I couldn’t be her wine.It was in my nature;I longed for a steady windto cast me about in five hundred directions,to grow again, apart from that placeand from her.

So I left.A weed and a flower,a flower and a weed,I launched into the breeze,billowing about through wintersand springs,summers and falls,at first without aim,at the whims of the wind,hither and thither,learning my shape and my size,my weedness and my florality,the pest and the prize,until now,at last, I gaze out of the gustand hope maybe for a gardenwith soil and a soulin which to root.